David's Blog

With your child's weekly piano lesson coming round (or violin or oboe or whatever), the inevitable debate rears its ugly head about "how often have you practised this week?". Sadly, classical music demands many hours of practice: even international stars seem to spend a terrifying proportion of their waking hours practising, regardless of how much native talent they have.

The answer to the question "how much practice do I need" depends largely on what standard you want to achieve. If you just want to learn a bit about the instrument and become competent to play a few pieces nicely, you'll get away with an hour or three a week. If you want to play in a band or orchestra without making a fool of yourself, you'll need more. But how much do you need to become a real expert, a world-class performer?

Finishing our Italian trip in Venice: here are a few sketches about what's going on.

Inevitably, I suppose, it's pretty much wall-to-wall Vivaldi. You'll find performances of the Four Seasons every day, sometimes in several different places; there are occasional concerts featuring his other works. A lot of the music is packaged for tourists rather than for sophisticated classical music listeners: we tried a typical event calling itself "Baroque and Opera" and consisting of one Baroque concerto (surprisingly not by Vivaldi) and a dozen or so favourite arias from Italian opera, performed by musicians in baroque dress.

This blog comes to you from the family holiday in Northern Italy, or more precisely from Desenzano del Garda on the southern shore of Lake Garda, surely one of the world's great beauty spots.

One of the joys (not) of running the Bachtrack website is the need to constantly keep cleaning the data. We try really hard to make sure that the lists of composers and works are in a consistent format, and as complete and accurate as we can make them, at least for the major composers. This results in tasks like this afternoon's effort of running through the thousand or so compositions by Schubert (extraordinary, given that he died aged just 31) trying to knock out all the duplicates and misspellings.

In the last few days, we've had a bunch of hits from people looking for Shostakovich's Tahiti Trot. Given Shostakovich's later output of complex, challenging and sometimes disturbed music, this has to rate as one of his more improbable pieces, being based around an orchestration of "Tea for Two".

I write this as I'm listening on a Sunday morning to a rather lovely Schubert composition on Radio 3: his A minor Sonata for fortepiano and arpeggione.

No, I hadn't heard of the arpeggione either. It enjoyed a brief vogue in Vienna in the 19th century, and is vaguely like a cello, but with six strings tuned and fretted like a guitar.

The Youth of Today are getting a bad press of late, particularly if, as we do, you live in a leafy part of North London worryingly close to some of the more gang-ridden areas.

So last night's prizegiving concert at Junior Trinity in the rather splendid setting of St John's Church, Waterloo, was a thoroughly heartwarming experience.

We decided to give the kids a taste of opera, and took them to the Magic Flute at London's Opera Holland Park yesterday afternoon. Very successful: the production was well enjoyed by all. In contrast to some of the critics, we thought there was lots of humour and fun in the production and staging, and thoroughly enjoyed the music. The combination of a pantomime-like plot and some of Mozart's most sublime music makes Die Zauberflöte very appealing to kids, and a great time was had.

Opera, witches, werewolves, trolls etc are an unlikely mix, but are brewed up and served beautifully in Terry Pratchett's Maskerade, which was brought home from my son's school library and avidly lapped up. (It was published in 1995)

Pratchett isn't everyone's cup of tea - you have to share his anarchic and pythonesque (verging on the batty) sense of humour, and enjoy, or at least put up with, the continual spoofing of by-now-conventional fantasy themes. It helps if you have got to know the standard Discworld characters: the housewife-and-mother-and-witch Granny Ogg, Death (who ALWAYS SPEAKS IN UPPER CASE), etc. If you're generally in sync with all this, he's side-splittingly funny.

A shiny new glass and steel office block next to a major railway station might not seem like an obvious concert venue. But that's precisely what developer Peter Millican has attempted with the new Kings Place development, and it looks like he's pulled it off.

Kings Place is otherwise a nicely designed office building, done in the current style with a tall atrium and backing attractively onto the canal (the less said the better about the urban landscape of Kings Cross station at the front). You simply don't expect to find an art gallery and a 460-seat concert hall inside.

Having been completely blown away by Gustavo Dudamel's performance of the Shostakovich fifth Symphony (see the review), I was on the lookout to see what other critics made of him. The answer is surprisingly polarised.

In the Evening Standard, Barry Millington was as enthused as me (and the audience) by the “high-octane performance”:

You'd normally look on the phrase "Prescient music critic" as something of an oxymoron, but here's a remarkable example, taken from Misha Donat's wonderful programme notes for the Wihan Quartet's performance at Blackheath Halls of Beethoven's Op.130.

The Op.130 quartet was originally written with a long, complex last movement of fantastic intensity - and very avant-garde for its day. Writing after its premiere in 1826, the reviewer for the Allgemeine musikaliche Zeitung commented: